In India, an App for Chats and for Keeping Secrets

As he prepares to enter engineering school, he is living in a hostel in Hyderabad. Like many young Indians who have left home for the first time, Mr. Gohain has been expanding his social horizons beyond the radar of his family in Guwahati, 1,500 miles to the northeast.

While they do not even know he has a girlfriend, his friends in Hyderabad know all about her, from the breezy status updates he posts using an instant messaging application in his phone, often in the form of confessions about what he was doing the evening before.

Users like Mr. Gohain are flocking to use the app, called Hike, for just that reason: It can keep a secret. In June the free service, which is less than two years old, surpassed 20 million users, making it by far the most popular Indian-made instant messaging system.

Hike’s selling point is that it lets users filter the information they transmit in sophisticated ways — and, more to the point, cloak aspects of their social lives from their parents.

Mr. Gohain hides the “last seen” timer that reveals to contacts when he has last logged in, so his parents believe him when he says he is busy studying. He keeps delicate one-to-one chats in “hidden” mode, and stores selected contacts in a concealed, password-accessible mode, so that someone picking up his phone will see only a list of innocuous contacts.

“One of the reasons Hike is trending is that young people crave control, and this app lets you have control,” Mr. Gohain said.

Like WeChat in China, Line in Japan and KakaoTalk in South Korea, in its home country Hike has started to outdo bigger global rivals like WhatsApp. It is tailored to attract the rapidly growing under-25 age group, in a society where the young are shedding conservatism.

Indians commonly live with their parents well into their 30s, and it is not unusual for middle-class families in smaller towns to share a single smartphone because of the cost, making privacy still more complicated. Hike’s developers knew those challenges because they had also faced them.

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“We focused on built-for-India features when we realized that free messaging apps are becoming red hot, but hardly any were tailored to the needs of the market,” said Kavin Bharti Mittal, Hike’s chief of product and strategy.

In a first for messaging apps, Hike allows its users to send free text messages to people who use “feature phones” —low-end devices that lack a smartphone’s ability to download apps — and to people who usually keep their phones’ Internet connection turned off to save money. It allows chats within groups of up to 100 people, and transfer of large files, a useful ability for students exchanging homework files.

India is the third-largest smartphone market by sales, after China and the United States, and since the end of last year it has been the fastest growing. Mr. Mittal calls it the “last frontier” for smartphone makers, as large numbers of feature phone users make the transition to more capable devices.

The proliferation of smartphones has fueled the explosive growth in messaging-app use. People are “going mad” over the free apps, said B. Kumaresh, who works at the Mobile Store, a retail chain outlet in Mysore.

Mr. Mittal — whose father founded Bharti Enterprises, the parent of India’s largest cellphone service provider — said his team was working on many more privacy and secrecy features.

Kriti Gupta, 21, a graduate student in Rohtak, in the northern state of Haryana, recently used Hike to conspire with classmates and throw a surprise party for a friend. She said messaging apps had become “part and parcel of life” for her generation.

Mr. Kumaresh, the salesman in Mysore, said that even though he had been selling phones for eight years, children only 10 or 11 often knew much more about messaging apps than he did. “Parents give phones to teenagers to keep tabs on them, but by using the secrecy features, the kids are neatly turning the tables on the older generation.”

Correction: August 28, 2014

An article on Tuesday about the popularity of an instant-messaging app called Hike, which allows young Indians to conceal aspects of their social lives from their families, misidentified the Indian state in which Rohtak, a city where a graduate student who uses Hike lives, is situated. It is in Haryana, not Punjab.

A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2014, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: In India, an App for Chats and for Keeping Secrets. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe